World's Most Controversial Monuments

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Outgoing president Alan García wanted to leave Peru a
surprise and hoped a 120-foot statue of Christ would protect
Lima.
But not everyone likes surprises—not Lima’s mayor, informed
only days before its June 2011 unveiling, and not locals
frustrated that construction was outsourced to Brazil.

García’s surprise statue certainly isn’t the first to spark
controversy. Some of the world’s most impressive monuments have
backstories of bickering, which, in addition to good gossip, give
travelers insights into local culture, history, and priorities.
Even when a monument’s construction is well publicized, a
positive reception isn’t guaranteed, whether because of differing
aesthetic tastes, costliness, or partisanship.

A recent case in point: the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on
the National Mall in Washington,
D.C. —27 years in the making. At its dedication on October
16, 2011, opposition to the memorial’s outsourced-to-China
design and its execution overshadowed the celebration. Poet
Maya Angelou went so far as to state that the inscription on
the memorial, a quote from King, made him “look like an
arrogant twit.”

A series of such controversies at the National Mall inspired Kirk
Savage to write the book Monument Wars. He notes that
even the development of the Washington Memorial—today accepted as
a national treasure—was a battle. “The Washington Monument itself
took over 50 years to build. There were incredible problems,”
Savage said in a PBS broadcast about the MLK Jr. monument
hullabaloo. “Nobody really wanted an obelisk.”

Not all monuments are set in stone; sometimes, what nobody wants
never materializes. Earlier this fall, in a poor province of
Vietnam,
construction was halted on a nearly $20 million tribute to
mothers of martyred soldiers from the Vietnam War. The
project’s spiraling costs had made it too unpopular—even among
the family of its central figure, Nguyen Thi Thu, who died in
December 2010. “My mother’s soul would not be happy with
this,” daughter Le Thi Tri ultimately told the press.

Outside Madrid, unhappy locals have railed against a certain site
for so many years that the government has formed a commission to
recommend modifications. Read on for the inside story on that and
more monumental controversies.

Love her or hate her, Eva (Evita) Perón now has her own big
attention-grabbing mural that literally overshadows a statue of
iconic literary figure Don Quixote. While Evita was a champion of
charities and the women’s suffrage movement in Argentina, she was
also criticized for being corrupt and calculated. Unveiled in
July 2011, Daniel Santoro’s mural of this controversial figure in
Argentine history has received similarly mixed reviews.